Services

Areas of Practice

The process

Reach your audience emotionally by figuring out “what’s in it for them.”

Develop examples and stories that powerfully illustrate your message.

Practice the exact situation you are preparing for, whether it’s a panel, speech, or interview.

Turn your sales presentation into your first working session.

Enhance your natural ability and phrasing.

Get in charge of yourself, in control of your message and in command of your audience.

Our process can prepare you for boardroom presentations, speeches, media interviews, internal meetings, sales, new business development or any other communication situation.

Confidentiality: everything said and done in coaching sessions is completely confidential.

Presentation and Speeches

Who is your audience? What are they interested in? Why are you are speaking to them? Usually your purpose is to persuade, and we show you how, using information your audience cares about and nothing else.

Generalities don’t communicate, specifics do. We coach you to discover great stories that support your point, avoid visuals that don’t, and eliminate visuals containing text. (The audience doesn’t know whether to listen to you or read the slides.)

The Situation: A promising young partner could easily muster all the facts, but he wasn’t compelling when he gave a presentation. He didn’t come across as “real.” In fact, he seemed a bit robotic.

In Training: We could see that there was a personality in there, so we dug around a little to find it. The young partner revealed that he had worked years to hide his Brooklyn accent when he gave presentations. We coached him to give the presentation as though he were talking to his friends. Suddenly, there was a different person in front of us—an engaging and highly charismatic speaker…with a very mild Brooklyn accent.

The Result: The young partner felt liberated from the rigid presentation persona he had developed for himself and became one of the firm’s highest-grossing sales leaders.

Sales

Great sales presentations answer your customer’s most burning question— “what’s in it for me?” Visuals should enhance and support your message. Our coaching sees that you make your point – not just Powerpoint.

It’s a soundbite, headline, hyperlink world. Deliver succinct information that speaks to you audience’s needs and you control the story. Drone on—and they’re moving on.

The Situation: Our client was the underdog competing for a new, lucrative health care consulting contract.

In Training: We found that the sales team’s proposed PowerPoint presentation had 78 slides, lasted 45 minutes—and had no clear message. We uncovered the message—how the firm could bring value to the client—and discovered that it could be communicated clearly and compellingly using one whiteboard.

The Result: The revamped presentation ran only 15 minutes including interactive use of the whiteboard. It left time for a 45-minute Q&A session that became the team’s first working session with the client. The team won the major contract—along with additional work that had been slated for a competitor.

Media

Talking to the media is not a natural conversation. It’s a learned skill that smart companies and individuals use as a business tool.

Members of our staff have been reporters, producers, journalists, and photographers at the nation’s leading media outlets. We use our insiders’ advantage to demystify the media machine, show you how it operates and how you can harness its power to deliver your message.

The Situation: A lawyer involved in a large industrial accident had agreed to be part of a story on 60 Minutes. The producer had assured him it would be a fair, balanced segment, but when he contacted us and described the situation—the story was about a toxic waste spill where fumes had blanketed an entire city—we realized that there was a good chance our client was being set up as the villain of the story.

In Training: The lawyer’s first instinct was to defend his position and give all the legal reasons why his actions during and immediately after the accident had been proper. We proposed a new strategy: to focus not on the lawyer and his immediate actions, but the human story, which included the steps he and others took to help people negatively affected by the accident.

The Result: During the interview, our client deftly handled the first question, which was a direct attack, and moved on to the story of how people were helped after the accident, making the segment truly fair and balanced.